The poems in Cynthia Hogue's collection, Or Consequence, range from meditations on "freedom" to poems crossing cultural and formal boundaries. The first and third sections introduce a series of informal etudes, which contemplate timeless aspects of human experience (love, power, memory, trust, war and peace). Such subjects are brought to bear on language as excavation and reclamation in Hogue's central section, a discrete series entitled "Under Erasure/ Ars Cora," after the last slave, Cora Arsene, to use the courts to sue for freedom on the eve of the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law. In the devastating aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Hogue's poem cycle meditates on traces: traces of a lost life, of a presence that has been erased, part of the palimpsest that is post-Katrina New Orleans (a city in which Hogue once lived). In the case of Cora Arsene, Hogue finds such a trace lying unnoticed, forgotten, but sign of a dynamic, courageous presence that persists. These poems invoke this presence in classic lyric strategy, but not to reembody the lost but to follow the trace's thread from the real to the sublime. Hogue's is an innovative poetics of inquiry, an analytic lyric striking a balance between method and music, collage and image, and finally, between violence and that other ancient human capacity, love.
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Height: 229 mm
Width: 159 mm
Thickness: 6 mm
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ISBN-13
978-1-59709-476-4 (9781597094764)
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Cynthia Hogue has published five previous collections of poetry, including The Incognito Body (Red Hen Press 2006). She is the co-editor of Innovative Women Poets: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry and Interviews (2006), and of the first edition of H.D.'s The Sword Went Out to Sea (Synthesis of a Dream), by Delia Alton (2007). She has received Fulbright, NEA (poetry), and NEH (Summer Seminar) Fellowships. In 2005, she was awarded the H.D. Fellowship at the Beinecke Library at Yale University, and in 2007, a MacDowell Colony Residency Fellowship. In 2008, she was awarded an Arizona Commission on the Arts Artists Project Grant for a multigenre project of interviews with Hurricane Katrina evacuees. Hogue taught in the MFA program at the University of New Orleans before moving to Pennsylvania, where she directed the Stadler Center for Poetry at Bucknell University for eight years. While in Pennsylvania, she trained in conflict resolution with the Mennonites and became a trained mediator specializing in diversity issues in education. In 2003, she joined the Department of English at Arizona State University as the Maxine and Jonathan Marshall Chair in Modern and Contemporary Poetry.
